Commons News
Gilberto Gil and David Byrne Concert: Wall Street Journal and New York Times
Fuller re-caps of the New York WIRED + Creative Commons concert with Gilberto Gil and David Byrne are on the way. (We’ve all just arrived back home after a very hectic and great week in the Big Apple.) For now, check out a couple of choice press accounts from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (reg. required).
As soon as we have reprint rights to these stories, you’ll find them here.
No Comments »We can work it out
BBC commentator Bill Thompson, riffing on the ongoing dispute between Apple Computer and Apple Corps (the Beatles), has a suggestion:
In the days they set up Apple Corps they were radical hippies who challenged the establishment in many ways.
Wouldn’t it be nice if they did the same thing now, and made the music available without rights management systems, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license that let others reuse their songs?
It would be a wonderful gesture to the future, recognising that the Fab Four only succeeded because they were inspired by those who came before, taking riffs and musical forms from others.
Maybe it’ll never happen with the Beatles. However, today’s radical musicians may wish to consider the message that wraps up Justin Cone’s Building on the Past before selling out:
No Comments »Creativity always builds on the past.
And you’re building the past right now.
Share now.
Shape tomorrow.
Great concert, and news of updates
(photo by Kathryn Yu)
If you attended or heard the webcast of the Creative Commons Benefit Concert that was presented by WIRED last night, I’m sure you’ll agree it was a fantastic show. Gilberto Gil and David Byrne played for almost two hours each, and even sang a couple songs together. We want to thank everyone that came out and everyone that helped setup the show.
We’ve updated the WIRED page with new information, featuring a short snippet from our second movie explaining the Sampling licenses. We’ve also created a one-page comic explaining how the license works in practice.
In other news, we’ve also launched a new way to support the work of our non-profit. Our support page carries several ways to give to the organization: you can become a Commoner and obtain varying levels of merchandise for your donation, you can donate directly, and you can buy t-shirts from us or cafepress.
No Comments »Creative Commons Benefit Concert Webcast
Thanks to the Ken and the team at Smartley-Dunn, we’re pleased to announce that our upcoming concert this Tuesday night in New York City will be webcast live from this page (requires Apple’s Quicktime player). Ticketmaster says the show is now sold out, and we won’t be archiving the audio, but the concert will be streamed September 21st, live starting at 8PM EST. We want to thank Ken for putting it together, Wired, David Byrne, and Gilberto Gil for letting it happen, and Apple for hosting it all.
No Comments »Searching for Creative Commons on Yahoo!
In addition to using our new search engine to find great content to build upon and share, you can also do interesting searches using Yahoo!, who currently indexes ~ 4.7 million Creative Commons licensed pages. Yahoo! allows you to constrain searches to pages that link to specific Creative Commons licenses using the “link:URL” function. For example, these are all the Yahoo! results for pages that link to the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The linkback feature, coupled with a regular text search, can yield some interesting results:
Here are all the Yahoo! indexed pages that have the word “sunset” on them, and link to the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.
Versus the Creative Commons search: Here are all the Creative Commons indexed pages that have images on them, the word “sunset,” and I can modify and alter.
The Creative Commons search engine works differently, in that it’s able to add another layer of granularity to the search, by reading code embedded into the web page. By reading this code (that comes with every Creative Commons license) it understands what kind of content it’s finding (image, video, audio, text, etc.) and searches across different license attributes. It’s almost like a huge distributed database across the Web.
Our search engine is one of the first of its kind to demonstrate the Semantic Web, a vision led by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web.
No Comments »Political Expression and Copyright
Today Robert Greenwald announced the release of footage from his controversial film Outfoxed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. The release of his earlier film, Uncovered, will follow soon.
Says Greenwald:
In making Outfoxed and Uncovered, I learned how cumbersome and expensive it can be to license footage from news organizations. Creative Commons licenses allow me as a filmmaker to know immediately how I can use a piece of content in my films. I could think of no better way to walk the talk myself than by releasing the interviews from Outfoxed and Uncovered under a license that allows other filmmakers to use my material in new and creative ways. I look forward to seeing what others do with these interviews.
As you know (or at least I hope you do), Creative Commons is a nonpartisan organization. What excites us about this announcement is not Greenwald’s content or viewpoint, but rather the fact that a prominent political speaker has realized that “all rights reserved” copyright might not serve his goals. Like pretty much all expression, political speech is automatically copyrighted when fixed in a medium. And yet political speech’s reason-for-being is to be heard far and wide. Whether in the form of campaign pamphlet, polemical movie, or protest song, core expression is perfectly suited to online distribution. It’s also perfect for interaction: You’ve got to be able to use an adversary’s speech to rebut it. In the digital age, that often means copying and re-framing a piece of media. Fair use provides some cover for this kind of thing, but political debate should be settled on its merits, not by copyright litigation prodecure.
We’d be thrilled, especially in the middle of this campaign season, if people across the political spectrum — conservative or liberal, pro- or anti-Fox — followed Greenwald’s lead, or took him up on his offer to interact with and even try to rebut his film.
Get the footage. Check out the torrent, via Torrentocracy.
No Comments »iRATE discoveries: William Brooks and Magnatune
We’ve written about iRATE radio and Magnatune several times in the past, including together.
Now Erik Möller writes a nice article about discovering Magnatune artist William Brooks via iRATE.
No Comments »Developing Nations license launched
Today the Creative Commons launched a new standalone license, dubbed Developing Nations. The deed lays it out simply: it’s an attribution-only license that applies within developing nations. The legal code defines developing nations as “any nation that is not classified as a ‘high-income economy’ by the World Bank.” which according to the World Bank’s site means it does not apply in these countries.
This license can be used in a few ways. It can be combined with something currently licensed under a more restrictive license, so that your photographs could be protected from commercial use in the United States, but if it also carried a Developing Nations license, those same photos could be used commerically in say, Brazil. You might also be a musician or photographer that wants to maintain full copyright in North America and Western Europe, but welcome use by others in the countries of Southeast Asia. More information can be found in today’s press release.
No Comments »In Arizona
I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona today and tomorrow for the Open Source, Open Standards conference. Unfortunately I couldn’t make Larry Rosen‘s talk this morning, but I hope to catch Bruce Perens‘s this afternoon. I’m speaking tomorrow, but as with Foo Camp, this is the sort of crowd and event where I do a lot more listening than talking.
No Comments »A Weekend Trip Where I Don’t Have to Explain My Job
I’m at O’Reilly Media‘s Foo Camp this week, a weekend tech-folk retreat at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol offices. Lots of old friends from EFF, iBiblio, MusicBrainz, Mozilla, OSAF, BBC and more, plus plenty of new acquaintances. I’m a bit awed by the crowd and just doing a lot of listening and learning.
No Comments »
